Clients share the blame for sex trafficking misery

Two sex-trafficking rings have been broken up in our backyard in the past month.

Heather Yakin

Two sex-trafficking rings have been broken up in our backyard in the past month.

Alexander Adams III was busted March 28 by local police. On April 30, the feds announced they had broken up a 13-person ring in New York City that operated brothels in Newburgh and Poughkeepsie.

Officials say Adams trafficked local women, forcing them into compliance with violence and threats and plying them with heroin and cocaine.

The New York City ring tricked young women and girls from Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries into coming to the United States with promises of a better life, according to prosecutors. The results were the same for all of the women: Enslavement. Pain. Misery.

The alleged traffickers have been arrested. They're looking at long incarcerations, if convicted.

Here's what I want to know: Who were the clients? Were they too preoccupied to notice if the women were drugged and bruised? Did they not care? No, the customers paid their $30 or $35. They used the women. They went blithely on their way.

The pimps paid rent or room fees. Someone accepted the money and didn't ask questions, even as a string of men went in and out of the apartment or the motel room. Maybe those landlords or clerks heard yelling or screaming, but they looked the other way.

Everyone along the way seems to have treated these women as commodities, as something less than human.

Treated like chattel, brutalized and terrorized. I imagine the women quickly began to feel there was no possibility of escape — and that they were unworthy of a normal life.

At 7:30 p.m. May 20 at the Downing Film Center in Newburgh, the YWCA of Orange County is sponsoring a showing of "Very Young Girls," an expose of the commercial sex industry in New York City.

Awareness of sex trafficking is relatively new, but the industry is not.

Someone with a long memory called me last week to let me know of the last big exploitation ring broken up in Newburgh. The year was 1984 and Harold Nelson was running a sex-slavery operation out of Newburgh. He held the women against their will in Newburgh and took them to New York City to sell their bodies.

Nelson and another man pleaded guilty to promoting prostitution. It was Nelson's second such conviction; in 1975, he went to prison for running a sex-trafficking ring in Albany. But two convictions didn't stop him. By 1992, Nelson was at it again, in New York City. He got nine to 18 years once officials caught up with him. He's currently in state prison.

Time will tell if Adams, the latest local trafficking suspect, will be convicted.

But the buyers?

They're still out there, free as birds, trolling Internet escort sites for the next woman they can rape for $30.

To report human trafficking call 888-373-7888 or send a text to BEFREE (233733). For more information visit www.polarisproject.org.